Sorting would certainly be great. I'd especially welcome sorting by some kind of quality metric. The "thumbs down" count is not available via API anymore, but you could use thumbs up per views as a proxy, although that might require some reweighing, since videos with many views usually have fewer thumbs up.
You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.
You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.